Wednesday, June 27, 2012

But for a decision of New York's Landmarks Preservation
Commission, the Tudor City sign would be just a memory today,
leaving 42nd Street's eastern terminus without one of its
most visually engaging features.Neon roof
signs for apartment buildings were somewhat common in Los Angeles, but have
always been rare in New York, the sign at Tudor City apparently being the
only surviving example today.

Tudor City, with the East River beyond. (T. Rinaldi)

Signs over the Ojai, Fontenoy and Los Altos buildings in Los Angeles. Neon signs for apartment buildings were somewhat common in LA, as the examples pictured above attest, but never really caught on in New York. (T. Rinaldi)

Originally, the Tudor City sign was part of a matched set,
which beamed west down 42nd Street from atop a pair of high-rise apartment buildings.Fred French, Tudor City's developer, conceived
of the complex as an almost semi-suburban enclave in the
heart of the city, eventually including ten buildings in all.French positioned the
signs to catch the eye of weary commuters heading back to Grand Central and the
suburbs after a day at the office or a night on the town, as if to say "if you
lived here, you'd be home by now."

Tudor City's original twin incandescent bulb signs, depicted in a period sketch published in the Edison Monthly. (Edison Monthly, December 1928)

The signs reared their heads in the late 1920s, perched on
the rooftops of Prospect Tower to the
north and Tudor Tower to the south (completed in 1927 and 1929, respectively).Incandescent bulbs originally outlined their
giant letters, but after about ten years, the management upgraded to neon,
hiring Claude Neon Lights to retrofit the sign over the Prospect Tower on the
north side of 42nd Street.The
other sign had already been removed, likely because the construction of the
Woodstock Tower at 320 East 42nd Street blocked it from view.

Tudor City's neon conversion scored coverage in Signs of the Times magazine in 1939. (Signs of the Times, June 1939, above; October 1939, below; used with permission)

The surviving sign hasn't come alight in decades, but a 1939
blurb in Signs of the Times magazine records that its tubes once glowed a shade of "old
gold," which would have been more or less consistent with the off-white hue of
the incandescent bulbs they replaced.("Old
gold" was a relatively popular color for neon signs at the time; the great RCA
sign atop 30 Rockefeller Plaza used the same shade.)In 1995, Prospect Tower's co-op board filed
for a permit to remove the sign, but was rebuffed by a unanimous vote of the
Landmarks Commission, which had designated the entire Tudor City complex for protection in 1988. Thus spared to survive into more "enlightened" times, perhaps one day that old gold glow might once again brighten the east end of 42nd Street.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel
neon. I never felt sadder in my life.

Jack Kerouac, On The Road, published 1957

The sign lured you. Like a hard-sell street hawker,
its job was to drown out the competition. This is the best hotel! Stay here! Once inside, you begin to realize that the
brightness of the sign spoke less to the quality of the
establishment than to the management's eagerness to get your money.
Outside, the sign's radiance promised a safe, clean respite. In
the room it's a different story: almost like a bait-and-switch, the bright
light of the sign piercing into your room actually denies you the rest it
promised. (Unless, of course, it wasn't rest you came here for.) Your
cynical side tells you you've been had, that the management cares more about
packing in as many guests as possible than about providing anyone with a decent
night's sleep. Soon it's common wisdom: only dopes and
suckers fall for those flashy neon signs. Eventually, the hotel managers
catch on, too. Better hotels ditch neon. The old hotels that keep
the signs are those whose patrons are too dumb or too destitute to care.

This was the general idea. Sure, you could just pull
down the shade. But here, at these old hotels, neon signs became
identified with capitalism's downside – unscrupulous commodity pushers bent on
profit for profit's sake. As mainstream hotels did away with neon signs,
the less reputable hotels that kept the signs deepened the association.
Especially in declining American cities, such signs conjured up
scenes of vice and vermin, violence, alcohol
and prostitution, gunshots in the night, hourly rates, loud domestic quarrels overheard
through thin walls, unsavory "transient" guests dealing drugs in dim hallways,
dead bodies found in musty rooms, where buzzing, flickering neon signs beamed
indifferently through dirty windows.

How this image became so indelibly etched in the mindset of
the American mainstream is almost as fascinating as the imagery
itself. Writers and film makers exploited it, reflecting and
perpetuating the association over and over again until no bohemian existence
was complete without at least one sleepless night at the hands of a
sign - ideally flashing - out the window of a cheap hotel room. The ever present blinking sign motif appears in film
as early as 1931, with director Mervyn LeRoy's "Little Caesar"(though the sign depicted belongs to a
social club, not to a hotel). Used perhaps to greatest effect in the hotel scene in Fritz Lang's 1945 film "Scarlet Street," the flashing sign device conveys
disquietude, or, like a highway alert sign, warns of danger ahead.

Early on, it is interesting to note, filmmakers used
incandescent bulb signs for this part, seizing on their obsolescence to set a fringe mise-en-scène. The transition to neon came in the 1940s, possibly beginning with Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler's seminal hardboiled crime novel of 1941. "I lay on my back on a bed in a waterfront hotel and waited for it to get dark," recounts the redoubtable Philip Marlowe: "The reflection of a red neon light glared on the ceiling. . . . I thought of dead eyes looking at a moonless sky, with black blood at the corners of the mouths beneath them. . . . It got darker. The glare of the red neon sign spread farther and farther across the ceiling."

By the next decade, such vignettes made neon hotel signs an essential element of the film noir landscape, and of the bohemian iconography of demimonde characters such as Sal Paradise, protagonist of Jack Kerouac's beat novel On The Road. From a tenderloin flophouse in San Francisco, Kerouac wrote, Paradise "looked out the window at the winking neons," after "a gray-faced hotel clerk let us have a room on credit. . . . Then we had to eat, and didn't do so till midnight, when we found a nightclub singer in her hotel room who turned an iron upside down on a coathanger in the wastebasket and warmed up a can of pork and beans. . . . I stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest time of my life."

David Janssen, TV's "Fugitive," on the lam in 1963 (above). Joe Buck peers out from his room at Times Square's old Claridge Hotel in "Midnight Cowboy" (below, 1969).

Separated by due distance of time, all of this seems rather quaint today. In New York, most of those old divey flops of yesteryear have been born again as high-end condos and co-ops. Sure there are still cheap hotels and SROs, but they seem less notorious now, and old neon signs no longer count among their compulsory accoutrements. If we could find a dingy old hotel with such a sign, we might even stay there for nostalgia's sake, so that we could feel just a little bit like Sal Paradise, a died-in-the-wool bohemian. In a roundabout way, the same negative connotations that once sullied neon's repute now add up to an appealing mystique. Judge with caution today's pariahs; they may yet have the last laugh.

Monday, June 11, 2012

The murky origins of neon signs make it perennially
difficult to pick any single anniversary to celebrate as their true date of birth.One date, however, is hard and fast: on June 12,
1898, the British scientists Sir William Ramsay and Morris William Travers discovered
the gas they named neon.

"Of the five elements with four-letter names, it's the only one that's not solid at room temperature." (Jeopardy)

The details of the discovery are well recorded thanks to numerous
published works, including several books authored by Travers later in his life."The blaze of crimson light from the tube
told its own story, and it was a sight to dwell upon and never to forget," he remembered
in The Discovery of the Rare Gases, published in 1928:"nothing in the world gave a glow such as we
had seen."

Sir William Ramsay's discovery of neon and the other noble gases helped earn him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1904. It was Ramsay's adolescent son Willie whose suggestion led the gas to be called "neon" in 1898. (NobelPrize.org)

At risk of some reckless oversimplification, I will attempt to reduce the science to layman's
terms.Ramsay and Travers spent
years isolating the various gases that exist in the earth's atmosphere –
in other words, breaking the air we breathe down into its component parts.To do this, they cooled air to an extremely
low temperature, turning it to liquid.As the liquid air then warmed, its component elements returned to a
gaseous state in sequence, making it possible to collect small samples of
them individually. In addition to neon, this basic
principle enabled Ramsay to discover argon, krypton and xenon.Neon's luminous properties became apparent
almost immediately: as a matter of course, Ramsay and Travers passed an
electric current through a glass-enclosed sample of the gas, an analysis of the resultant glow
helping to determine whether they indeed had found a new gas.

Morris William Travers, aka "Rare Gas Travers", was in his twenties when he and William Ramsay discovered neon. (Science Photo Library)

All of this happened in the last years of the long reign of
Queen Victoria: odd as it may seem, neon is a bona fide product of the Victorian
era.By at least one account, Ramsay and
Travers used neon together with several other gases to make an illuminated sign
in tribute to Victoria in 1898.(My efforts to find primary documentation of
this sign have thus far come to naught.)

Sample colors in the New York shop of Let There Be Neon. After its discovery, neon took on something of a life of its own. Many if not most luminous tubes used for "neon signs" actually contain argon, not neon. (T. Rinaldi)

Another decade would pass before other developments facilitated the
commercial viability of neon illumination.For all the controversy that would haunt the evolution of neon signs
in the years that followed, credit for neon's place on the periodic table
remains securely with Ramsay and Travers.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

"Talk to Paul," the man told me on the phone.*"He'll tell you anything you want to know
about the sign."I could hardly believe
my luck!Here in my hot little hands I
had a lead on the true provenance of a real New York icon: the Tom's Restaurant
sign, on Broadway at 112th Street, known the world over
thanks to its regular appearances in the TV sitcom "Seinfeld."

Tom's Restaurant on a brisk fall night in October, 2006. (T. Rinaldi)

Already, what I had managed to learn about the sign had
piqued my curiosity.Records at the
Municipal Archives indicated that it had been installed by an unknown sign
company in 1957, for an establishment known as the Columbia Restaurant.This got me to wondering: did the part of the sign that now reads
"TOM'S" originally say "COLUMBIA"? Perhaps in a jaunty midcentury script? On
my next trip to Tom's, with furrowed brow, I gave the old sign a close examination.A few anomalies quickly caught my
eye.First, the lettering for TOM'S
doesn't quite match the adjacent lettering for RESTAURANT (TOM'S being slightly
more extended, or wider, than the rest).

The lettering for TOM'S is slightly different from that for RESTAURANT. (T. Rinaldi)

Then there's the sign's hand-painted finish.By 1957, hand-painted neon signs were pretty much a thing of the past in New York.More likely,
this would have had faces of porcelain enameled steel, which could have
been painted over later to cover-up a name change.And finally, there is a tell-tale seam in the sheet metal sign face
between TOM'S and RESTAURANT – could it be that the part reading COLUMBIA was
cut-off and replaced with new sheet metal, and then the whole thing painted in
the blue-and-white colors of Columbia University? The answer to this mystery, I hoped, lay with this man Paul.

The corner of Broadway and West 112th Street, October 12, 2006. (T. Rinaldi)

At length, the day came.I called ahead to be sure he would be working.A few hours later I found
him there, stationed at the cash register. I introduced myself and explained my bizarre cause. The man was friendly and gregarious, as Tom's staff usually are. But it soon became clear that he couldn't tell me anything about the sign. He had been there a long time, he said, but the sign was there longer.

Two views of Tom's, September 20, 2010. (T. Rinaldi)

For now, at least, the secret of Tom's neon is safe. As far as most of the world is concerned, however, this whole question is of marginal significance, literally: throughout its tenure on "Seinfeld", the TOM'S portion of the sign was neatly cropped out of view, and the place was known to viewers as the fictitious "Monk's Coffee Shop". Out of sight, out of memory.

ABOUT

New York Neon is a new book released by W.W. Norton that presents a documentary homage to old neon signs in New York. The primary motivation for this project is to record the significance of these signs as works of design that characterized New York's 20th century streetscapes. This blog will feature occasional news items related to New York's dwindling number of old neon signs, as well as sundry "cutting room floor" items that didn't make it into the book.